Despite the Mess of Us
Nature Perseveres, and So Do We
This war, perhaps like all wars, has thrust the natural and the man-made into startling contrast. I have written before about purple lupines rippling over battle-weary hills, and blossom-veiled almond trees as delicate as the daily news is coarse. Now, as I survey the street from my Jerusalem balcony, I notice ordinary trees—leaves unfurling, yellow fuzz tumbling to the sidewalk—radiating an energy the war zapped from us months ago. I remember that these trees greened last year (when there was a war) and the year before (when there was not). They will green again, despite the west-east winds that blast the neighborhood, the simmering summer that surely lies ahead, and us. In poet Ada Limón’s words, they offer “a return to the strange idea of continuous living, despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty.” They are instructions on not giving up.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
By Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Copyright © 2017 by Ada Limón. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.